Sunday, August 14, 2016

How to Achieve Your Goal – A Recipe for Success

How to Achieve Your Goal – A Recipe for Success

Another week rolls around and for all the things we chose to do or get done, there are always those things we simply can’t get around to doing.

The key, as always, is to focus on what is most important. And important means to you and yours.

We’ve often gone over here about how you test everything you run across, everything that you listen to or read.

Which brings us to our three points for this week:

Inspiration

Your beliefs seem to establish facts to prove themselves. This explains the old saying that if you tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth. But the converse is true – that if you tell the truth often enough people will adopt it and use it.

Belief, then, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is the stuff of movements, and tipping points. The flip side is that it’s also the reason cults flourish – usually only for the lifetime of their founder. The more truth you have on your side, the greater chance that your work will become viral and spread.

The ancient Polynesians had a saying: Truth is as valuable as it is workable. And so this explains Philosophy (philo = love of + sophos = truth) as “Love of things that work.” So philosphy is very close to engineering. And that explains how Henry Ford was able to succeed with the automobile in an age of horse-drawn carriages. And also why the passenger rail system only survives based on government support, while commercial airlines work and private flight hasn’t had the same success as cars do.

It also explains why terrorism is always doomed to failure, regardless of how much our press promotes it.

This point came up as I continue to edit the first draft of a book on belief, which working title is “When You Believe, You Succeed.”

Of course, I wasn’t intending to do any more than simply introduce people to the books mentioned in Earl Nightingale’s “Strangest Secret” recording. I’ve also mentioned that books have a life of their own. Once you look into the soul of a book, then you’re committed to tell that story more as a guide than an author.

What you believe tends to create the world around you. You create your own success or lack of it by the faith you put behind your own beliefs. And regardless of where you got your beliefs, you chose them and they are yours. The one saving grace is that your belief-system is non-permanent. Your beliefs are in constant flux and evolution.

The worst part of this are any beliefs you hold that you haven’t examined and tested for workability. If any part of these are false, then you can possibly experience a partial or complete melt-down of your belief-system. This is called a paradigm shift. It’s also called failure.

The best part of it is that none of this is permanent, and humankind is very resilient. Simply re-work your beliefs based on tested and proved ideas, and start back up on your road to success. (Success being whatever you want it to be, of course.)

Success Strategies

Here we usually simply cover publishing, since the passive income from this area can bring you financial freedom enough to follow whatever bliss it is that makes you feel good all the time.

The vast majority of the book publishing courses out there deal with Kindle ebooks. Few examine print or audio books and fewer still the huge world that exists beyond the walled garden of Amazon. However, Kindle ebooks deal with less than 30% of the total book sales possible. And these statistics are sketchy, since there are no real comprehensive studies out there. The Big 5 release their own statistics (where they keep shooting themselves in their collective foot) and Author Earnings only lives inside the Amazon garden itself.

With over 70% of ebook, paperback, hardback, and audiobook sales (leaving spoken-word CD’s for now) occurring outside Amazon Kindle, then this can be an interesting approach to income.

The general route for success is to publish in all possible formats and on all possible platforms. Once you have a digital version of anything, it’s fairly simple to generate all the other alternatives.

The main point is to get your book-versions into Ingrams and other wholesalers, where bookstores and libraries can then stock them for you.

The simplest ways to do this are to use Print on Demand publishers for paperbacks and hardbacks such as Lulu.com and IngramSpark (although this last has annual fees to keep your books in circulation, a carry-over from earlier days.) CreateSpace, however touted, isn’t much appreciated outside Amazon, and they don’t do hardbacks.

Your ebooks and CD’s both have different lines to get into these wholesalers. This cries out for an aggregator to do this work for self-publishers. Otherwise, you really are committed to building an independent publishing house to do this for you.

You can then promote to Libraries to carry your print books, as well as your audiobooks and CD’s.

Meanwhile, you’re running FB ads to promote your titles (meaning: all book versions of the same original digital file) in various regional areas.

Again, this means running your business as a real business. And that’s different from self-publishing authors running FB ads to make their Kindle ebooks a hit – which is the current limited definition of success.

Just wanted to give you an overview of what’s ahead for you as you work to really make some decent passive income for yourself. Passive income doesn’t mean set-and-forget. It means you spend part of your time daily or weekly actually doing the work of your business. And if you want to write new work the rest of your time (or visit the beach, mountains, or wilderness areas) you have that option.

Because such a business nowadays doesn’t mean you have to be tied down to a certain location. It just means that you have to run your business as a business in order to succeed.

Goal Achievement

As mentioned, I didn’t get done all I wanted to do this week. I got some things done, but had to sit back and review production to see why only that amount did get done.

The deal was really the problem of experimenting on a production line. Once you figure out how something works, then all you have to do is to put more products on that production line and get them through. When you test new items, there are always unexpected problems you’ll run into which suck your time. Always.

This lead me to unearthing an old and tested recipe to share with you.

How to Attain Your Goals:

1. Make a list of what has worked for you.
2. Make a list of what didn’t work.
3. Get the first list in.
4. Drop any action on the second list out.
5. Work out and get into a sensible working structure.
6. Let go of any efforts to defend or justify what you’ve been doing – simply get on with it.

And also, there is this.

Four Factors of Success

a. Hard work – focused self-discipline in working toward an established goal.
b. Abundant exchange – following the Golden Rule and also going the extra mile in all you do.
c. Know as you go – know your craft and your business in its basics and routinely applying these in every action.
d. Stick to the successful – do the things that always bring successs, quit chasing the “latest and greatest.”

Let me leave you with this revelation:

The statistic of 98% of all people not setting goals means that these same people are pushing the goals that the 2% did set. (It’s often called a “day job.”)

Hope this helps you with whatever you are working to accomplish this week.

As usual, let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you.

And thanks again for all the help you’ve given others. They appreciate it more than you know.